By-and-by her father didn't need to interrupt the main thread of his discourse more than to pause with pointed walking-stick for a second, while his little companion would interpolate briskly: "Ulmus Americana," or "Tilia." And if, instead of his instantly resuming story or homily, he still stood pointing, she would proceed: "Also commonly called bass, lime, or linden; bark used for matting and ropes; wood for sounding-boards; sap for sugar, and its charcoal for gunpowder."
He would nod and walk on, finishing his broken sentence as though nothing had intervened between subject and predicate. Although he was severe with her constitutional forgetfulness of dates, her father, at least, did not obtrude upon her the disgrace of extreme youth. He talked the gravest matters to her with an air of conferring with an equal. They discussed religion with no little openness, and, by dint of diligent inquiry, she heard, amazed, the extent of his unbelief. He had at first meant to be reticent, but as she got older and yet more inquiring, he had said:
"One thing, at least, a child has a right to expect from its parents, and that is truth. I am bound, as I see the matter, to give my child as faithful an account of the world as I am able. I am the traveller coming home, of whom the young one setting forth asks the way. Shall I advise him to go in the wrong direction because the old sign-posts misled me?" He would shake his head gloomily, and go on as if communing with his own soul: "Not consciously to mislead, that is the basic human obligation." Then he would look down on a sudden at the little school-girl trotting solemnly along by his side, and resume with a kind of severity: "I don't owe my child money"—he used to revert to this as if it were a sore point—"I don't owe my child worldly position or honors, or houses or lands, but I owe him honesty. I shall never consciously deceive him."
And so Sunday by Sunday she heard the Gospel preached at St. Thomas's in the morning, and in the later day the new tidings of science, and a sort of sublimated socialism, preached among the lanes and hills. She heard the story of the making of the world (not according to Genesis), and was invited to observe in "Nature's Workshop," as her father called the hills, how the making and transforming still went on.
"In these high places," he would say, with enthusiasm, "you may detect Nature in the very act."
Val was shown how busy the little brooks were, and the wide river as well, ever making "sedimentary deposits," still carving out its channel, wearing down the fire-born rock as surely as the chalk cliffs in its "ancient ineradicable inclination to the sea."
She saw for herself how the wind and the weather worked away day and night disintegrating, tearing down, until even to a child it was clear that one day the proud upstanding hills would be brought low, and lay their heads in the plain. There was a tragic element in the story and its ocular proof. It made the solid earth waver under the feet as in an earthquake. Her father had pointed out how even the old Fort that had so stoutly withstood the fierce Red Man could not hold out against this subtler foe. He had shown her where even the great corner-stones were exfoliating; with his finger-tip he could flake off the loosened bits, but regretfully, and only as an object-lesson. No child must lift a finger to help this insidious enemy; and yet, rightly comprehended, Nature and Nature's laws were our best friends, Val was given to understand. It was the theologian who had spoiled man's legitimate satisfaction in the world. Christianity had been the greatest curse of Time (this came as a lightning-flash); Christianity had killed art, discouraged learning, and set back the clock of Progress 2000 years; had turned man's thoughts and energies from the righteous task of making a heaven on earth; had filled him with foreboding, and forbidden him natural joys.
John Gano had no need to tell his daughter not to convey to her grandmother any inkling of this indictment of the holy faith. It was a thrilling secret. To be a sharer in it was a proud distinction which led to Val's being permitted to remain in the room when Professor Black, a contributor to her father's favorite periodical, the Popular Science Monthly, came on flying visits, and they sat and talked of these real dark ages of the world—Pliocene, Eocene, and the rest.
Mrs. Gano did not shrink from reading Darwin, and Spencer, and other books her son left about. As time went on she came to entertain the clearest views as to science being the handmaid of religion. In these later days of her own development, she had no quarrel with those "orthodox scientists," who regarded the Mosaic story with respect as "symbolical"—symbolical of what was not inquired. The vaster age of the world, the true story of the rocks, gave Mrs. Gano only a fresh and more passionate sense of the wonder and majesty of the ways of God. She corroborated and supported her new friends among modern historians and men of science as vehemently as of old she had upheld a favorite preacher, poet, or Biblical commentator. She objected vigorously to much she found in Buckle and Lecky, and to certain Germans whose names she disdained to utter, and bestowed her unqualified approval upon some of the lesser lights whose Theism was sound.